Supply chain management is a common problem for any organization that deals with the transportation of a large number of goods over a wide geographic area. Point-in-time-delivery is a major task for providers of logistic services as this is increasingly demanded by their clients. This is in particular true for manufacturing companies, where the successful supply of raw materials to make components, and components to make goods, is essential to the business goal of the manufacturing company. Thus, it is an important issue to monitor goods which are shipped from their source location to their destination location.
The international patent application WO 02/47048 discloses a method for real-time tracking of goods in a supply chain wherein a radio-frequency-ID tag is affixed to each good to be tracked or to each conveyance that is used to store or carry the goods, and in which the location of such good is marked at a few fixed service points en route by way of a contactless RF-ID marking between the tag affixed to the good and a so-called data appliance, i.e. a tag reader device which is provided at the service point. Such service points include intermediate stations, in which the goods are reloaded from one carrier device to another one when distributing the goods for example in a typical grocery supply chain. Dependent on the nature of the supply chain and the length of the route more or less such service points exist. When the tag is read at such service points a data set is generated including a time stamp, the tag-ID and the service point-ID. Such data are collected in a respective site server located at said service point and may be uploaded to a centralized “data center” which is used for billing purposes for example.
Although goods can be tracked in regard to time and location in a computer-based way some disadvantages remain, however.
When applying the teaching of this disclosure for the purpose of monitoring the quality of service of logistic services, manually-initiated marking is required according to this method, because for marking the location of a good, a passive RF-ID-tag must be passed by a respective RF-ID-tag reader device nearby, in order to generate a marking data set correctly. An active RF-ID tag can tolerate a wider distance from the reader, but is even more expensive. Any manual, human intervention, however which is necessary en route increases the costs of the logistic services provider.
Secondly, only a few, fixed marking points can be used during the travel time, because the above-mentioned RF-ID-tag reader devices are installed only at a respective few service points, when the goods are handled for regrouping them into more granular packages for the purpose of distribution, for example, or for any other reloading from one to the other carrier device. For many goods, however in particular when they are of higher value it would be desirable to have more tracking data, in particular such tracking data, which is recorded directly within the geographic travel in between the above-mentioned service points. Assume a case, in which such service points are hundreds of kilometers distant from each other, it would be strongly desired to be able to track time and location directly en route in order to discover situations in which the goods are not moved during their travel, for example because the truck driver who performs the transport of the goods is involved in an accident, or the truck does not move anymore because of any technical defect, or due to any other situations, like traffic jams, overnight resting time situations, and the like. All these situations happen always between such service points and are not tracked and are thus not retrievable in any post processing done for evaluation purposes, in order to monitor or improve the quality of logistic services as mentioned above.
Further, when applying the prior art method as mentioned above for controlling the quality of service of a logistic services provider no useful means is offered in this prior art method for guarantying that a test shipment of the goods is done according to objective boundary conditions because the human intervention required at the service points imply some subjective influence on the speed, in which such good is handled, because it is obvious that staff members knowing that sometimes a test shipment of particular goods is performed, would speed up the handling of such packages, if they were visibly provided with such an RF-ID-tag.
In the prior art method as mentioned above the use of global positioning service (GPS) data is disclosed in the context of the above-mentioned marking step, which takes place only at the above-mentioned service points. It is not disclosed, however in which way such GPS data is set in context with the good itself nor can be derived any useful teaching, how to use GPS data in the context of monitoring such goods.